I find something quite bleak about this.
The joy of participating in music, to me, is one of the few domains where we can still, to an extent, hide away from the relentless enclosure and commodification of every facet of our existence in the name of capitalist value extraction. Imagining oneself as an assembly line in order to rush past the experience of the creative process and arrive as quickly as possible at a finished artifact — to me this is an act of submission. It is accepting that one's market value as a musician, as measured by the number and popularity of commodities they produce, is of vastly greater importance than the depth and quality of their musical experiences, than any joy, pleasure, satisfaction, connection, growth, expression, or catharsis they experience through their participation in music.
I have no doubt this is an effective way to end up with a bunch of finished tracks. But I can't help but feel that it is missing the point.
> I have no doubt this is an effective way to end up with a bunch of finished tracks. But I can't help but feel that it is missing the point.
It depends what your goal is - if your goal is to have an enjoyable hobby, then yes, it's probably missing the point.
If your goal is to have the best outputs, then that might involve a different creative process.
If your goal is to make (good amounts of) money, then the popularity of your music is actually important. Writing music that will be popular is a skill in itself, which is probably a different skill to just writing the music that you find the most joy and satisfaction in writing. Writing music that brings you joy and hoping others find the same joy in it might work, but I suspect the musicians making the most money are often working hard to write what the market wants/accepts rather than just what brings them the most joy. There will be exceptions to every rule however.
I absolutely agree.
My consternation comes from the fact that we seem, culturally, to have arrived at a place where we value the creation of music (or rather, musical artifacts) in the service of gaining something (fame and profit, primarily) over enjoyment of the experience of music.
> But I can't help but feel that it is missing the point.
It’s perfectly fine if _your_ point in playing music is rooted in some flavor of anti-capitalism and your intrinsic joy of your creative process. _His_ point was to write an album during a sabbatical. He succeeded and then some!